Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Trend-setting gourmet dessert shop comes to Lansdale
LANSDALE » The local scoop on ice cream is that the most Instagramworthy novelty since the maple bacon donut is now on a roll in a discreet corner of the Big Lots shopping center in Lansdale.
Not familiar with rolled ice cream?
Just ask any teen or college-age connoisseur of all that is urban and trendy.
Like his peers, 21-year-old Eric Kim was wise to the proliferation of gourmet Asian dessert shops in Philadelphia’s Chinatown and other cities and was convinced his hometown area was ready for its own purveyor of rolled ice cream confections, bubble tea and milk snow — and he would gladly step up as the one to provide them, with his first foray into restaurant ownership, Cafe Cabana.
Now the Instagram-intensive crowd of largely middle and high school students are his target audience and most loyal customers.
“I really liked the idea of bringing trendy desserts to a suburban area. All of these desserts that you’ll see here are very common and trending now in any cosmopolitan area,” noted Kim, slipping into a booth at the recently opened Café Cabana.
With its tangerine-colored walls and zig-zag patterned seats, the vibe here is effervescent and inviting, precisely the sort of ambience Kim, who grew up in North Wales, was seeking when he and his partner Paul Cho, a friend of Kim’s father’s, decided to turn a former bakery into an intimate cafe.
“I’m pretty sure we’re the first place like this in the area, and we try to keep the quality as high as we can,” said the North Penn High School graduate. “My family and I went to Chinatown and my sister wanted to try this dessert and that dessert, so I just got the idea, why not bring all these things to one place in the suburbs?”
Rolled ice cream is just what you’d expect by the name — small rolls of made-to-order, surprisingly thin rolls of either vanilla or chocolate ice cream that are arranged into a cup according to the desired delight: Strawberry Shortcake, Berry Berries, BanaTella, S’mores, MangoNana, Coffee Time, Green Tea Melody and Ore Oreo, the most popular.
The free entertainment comes into play because the entire process of spreading out the specially formulated cream onto a cold pan and magically transforming it into ice cream is done right in view of the customer, explained Kim, who took some culinary classes at Montgomery County Community College.
It’s just a different way of eating ice cream, but the big thing is that it’s cool to watch it being made right in front of you, with this vanilla ice cream based being turned into something like a strawberry shortcake, or the chocolate base turned into a s’mores,” noted Kim, who explained that the treat was popular in countries like Thailand long before becoming a craze in New York and other cities.
Café Cabana — Kim’s mother suggested the name and it instantly resonated with him — also specializes in a signature dessert called milk snow, made from sweetened shaved milk, topped with fruit and red bean paste, based “It’s very trendy but it’s a revamped version of an old Korean dessert, patbingsu,” he said.
Japanese-style, hand-held sweet crepes, including Chocolate Banana and Strawberry Banana, are also on the menu, as are savory crepes like Sweet Chili Shrimp.
“We originally wanted to make this a desert café but then we realized we’d need to have something that was more like a meal so people would stop by for a reason other than just dessert,” Kim said. “If you look at all the frozen yogurt places that went out of business, they didn’t serve anything but dessert, so we needed to offer more than desserts.”
With Kim’s dad unofficially helping out and his brother handling social media, Café Cabana is more of a family affair than just a solo effort, Kim said.
“My father helped me create all the recipes, and his friend came on board as the benefactor of the business. We tested everything thousands of times at home, like how long we have to cook the tapioca for the bubble tea, how long we have to brew our teas, and things like that, and we got feedback from friends until we had everything perfect,” said Kim, who found he was operating a highly family-friendly little restaurant when the after-school crowd started bringing in their parents in the evening.
“Our target audience was the kids and we didn’t expect it to become such a family friendly place, but I’m glad that it is,” he said. “A lot of people don’t know what they’re looking for when they come in and they have questions because they may have seen rolled ice cream on TV and wanted to try it. And that’s the objective of being here,” Kim added, “because to get most of these desserts you’d have to go into Chinatown, which is nearly an hour away.”
Café Cabana is located at 628 E. Main St., Lansdale. Phone is 215-647-9001.